A Haiku of Garbage Food

While I am taking a month off, I am not a monster. I’ve added “A Haiku of Garbage Food” to the feed, where J. R. Blackwell and I joined Ursula Vernon andKevin Sonney‘s remarkable podcast Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap. It’s a good two hours of us eating questionable items and making jokes about “children’s whiskey” and “Man Scouts,” and it ends with us eating meticulously-crafted replica poop.

No, really. That’s what we ended on. J.R. and I brought the poop as a gift:

The bear was nice, but I think the raccoon was my favorite.

Ursula and Kevin have another remarkable podcast, The Hidden Almanac, where the vaguely-Catholic Reverend Mord expounds on the history and culture of a rich fantasy world. If you’re a fan of The Voice of Free Planet X, there’s a plethora of reasons to check out The Hidden Almanac. Not the least of which is the fact that VFPX will be crossing over with HA in February!

It’s my favorite episode of the new season, folks. Perhaps because it was so easy to record; we all just stood in Kevin’s recording studio and said our lines. It felt remarkably professional.

I made an upgrade to my gear for the new season, finally purchasing a Blue Snowball, the microphone that has been the standard for my podcasting pals for awhile now. My setup for the past few years has involved a combination of a Zoom H4n recorder and a Blue Snowflake, both of which are marvelous, portable microphones. But with more people coming to me to record, I wanted something a little sturdier, something that will stay at home and record more than one person at once.

Plus, I could get one in chrome. That was a huge selling point.

I’ve been using it a bit, and it is a very, very fine microphone. If you’re thinking about getting into podcasting, trust me, this is the one mic you need.

J.R. and I recently discovered Marie Kondo’s method for tidying up and getting rid of the things you neither want nor need, but are inexplicably holding onto. We’ve become quite taken with it. We’ve already gone through all our clothes and books, both of which were difficult for their own reasons. I am apparently a sock-hoarder; when I had counted all the socks I had accumulated, I found I could go nearly two months without having to wash socks once. Now, I admit to being a bit of a clothes-horse–I kept more clothes than J.R. did–but that was beyond the pale even for me. Some of those socks had literally never been worn.

It’s gotten me to rethink my definition of ownership. I had three pairs of pants that I hadn’t worn in years. They were just sitting in my drawer, taking up space. If you had seen what I’ve worn every day (and, if you follow me on Instagram, you have), you wouldn’t think I owned those three pairs of pants. And if I never used them, did I actually own them? Or was I just storing them?

Going through the books and comics was even harder. I haven’t tackled my longboxes yet, but I reduced my trades and graphic novels by about half. It was difficult to separate from the collector mentality, to look a my comics not as a collection, but as a library. Not “What was I proud I owned,” but “What do I enjoy reading.” So, a lot of comics J.R. had been proud to collect over the past years were removed, some of them common, some obscure, some of them even autographed. But when I look at the book shelf now, I don’t miss them. I kept all the stuff I enjoy.

I donated the rest to Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse, which just opened not too long ago. My friend Randy Green–aka R-Son The Voice of Reason of Gangstagrass and other such impressive projects–does their comics ordering, which meant he took me seriously when I said I had comics to give, but didn’t quite believe me when I said I didn’t want any money for them. They’re still accumulating their stock, so they were much happier to have volumes of Preacher and Lupin III to sell than I was just storing them. Amalgam is fantastic store, too. If you’re in the Philly area and you haven’t stopped by, you’re cheating yourself.

Seeing Randy so pleased with the comics took some of the edge off how difficult it was to go through them. I don’t know how I’m going to be able to go through my accumulation of toys.

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Jared Axelrod is an author, an illustrator, and a world changer. Through out her eventful life she has also been a circus performer, a puppeteer, a graphic designer, a sculptor, a costume designer, a podcaster and quite a few other things that she’s lost track of but will no doubt remember when the situation calls for it. But that “author’ business, that seems to be one she keeps coming back to.